equal pay

Governor Andrew Cuomo used the occasion of the ticker tape parade for the U.S. women’s soccer team in Manhattan to sign two bills that will make it easier for women in New York to receive pay that is equal to men’s salaries.

“She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” explores the history of the women who founded the modern women’s movement from 1966 to 1971. The documentary takes its audience from the founding of the National Organization for Women to the emergence of more radical factions of women’s liberation - telling a proud and reflective story about feminist accomplishments and missteps.

The film combines dramatizations, performance, and archival footage, along with interviews with women who fought for their own equality, and in the process created a world-wide revolution.

The New York State Writers Institute will present a screening of “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” tonight at 7:30 at Page Hall on UAlbany’s Downtown Campus. A q&a with director and award-winning documentary producer Mary Dore will follow the screening and she joins us.

Weren’t women supposed to have “arrived”? Perhaps with the nation’s first female President, equal pay on the horizon, true diversity in the workplace to come thereafter? Or, at least the end of “fat-shaming” and “locker room talk”?

Well, we aren’t quite there yet. But does that mean that progress for women in business has come to a screeching halt? It’s true that the old rules didn’t get us as far as we hoped. But we can go the distance, and we can close the gaps that still exist. We just need a new way.

In fact, there are many reasons to be optimistic about the future, says former Wall Street powerhouse-turned-entrepreneur Sallie Krawcheck. That’s because the business world is changing fast –driven largely by technology - and it’s changing in ways that give women more power and opportunities than ever.

Feminism has hit the big time. Once a dirty word brushed away with a grimace, “feminist” has been rebranded as a shiny label sported by movie and pop stars, fashion designers, and multi-hyphenate powerhouses like Beyoncé. It drives advertising and marketing campaigns for everything from wireless plans to underwear to perfume, presenting what’s long been a movement for social justice as just another consumer choice in a vast market. Individual self-actualization is the goal, shopping more often than not the means, and celebrities the mouthpieces.

But what does it mean when social change becomes a brand identity? Feminism’s splashy arrival at the center of today’s media and pop-culture marketplace, after all, hasn’t offered solutions to the movement’s unfinished business.

Andi Zeisler, a founding editor of Bitch Media, draws on more than twenty years’ experience interpreting popular culture in this biting history of how feminism has been co-opted, watered down, and turned into a gyratory media trend in her new book, We Were Feminists Once: From Riot Grrrl to CoverGirl®, the Buying and Selling of a Political Movement.

Today is Equal Pay Day. The date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to catch up to what men were paid the year before. That’s based on national figures, but New York and a few other Northeastern states fare better.

Congresswoman Nita Lowey, the senior Democrat on the House Appropriations Committee, stood in her Rockland County district office flanked by local elected officials and business leaders to highlight the consequences of pay inequity.